The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You [Deluxe Edition]

Neko Case has spent the last 15 years perfecting both a dark strain of alt-country and a lyrical style that rejects songwriting conventions in order to build up wholly new personal mythologies. As her songs have grown moodier and more cinematic, Case has become less willing to state anything outright, instead finding ever more circuitous routes around her subjects. Hers is a defiantly impressionistic style, both withholding and revealing, and it reaches a peak on her latest album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.

Despite a title that might leave Fiona Apple shaking her head, Case’s idiosyncratic record yields lovely and chilling moments. “Calling Cards” builds to a curious confession — “I’ve got calling cards from 20 years ago” — yet Case takes what sounds like a banal line about her hoarding tendencies and turns it into a devastating declaration of love and friendship, set to a lighter-than-air arrangement. “Man” is the most New Pornographic she’s sounded by herself, and “Night Still Comes” gains its considerable power from both her electric vocals and from her skewed imagery about puking up sonnets and the oblique accusation “You never held me at… read more »